Wireless communication devices include phones, computers, intelligent machines, or some other apparatus with a wireless transceiver. Wireless communication networks include base stations, distributed antenna systems, or some other type of wireless access point to exchange wireless signals with the wireless communication devices. The wireless communication devices and the wireless communication networks exchange electromagnetic signals over the air to support services like mobile Internet access, audio/video streaming, user data messaging, and the like.
Some wireless communication networks and devices use Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) to exchange wireless data. OFDM uses resource blocks of time elements and frequency elements to organize the data exchanges. The time elements are OFDM symbol times and the frequency elements are Radio Frequency (RF) subcarriers. The time/frequency combination of an OFDM symbol and an RF subcarrier is called an OFDM resource element. The resource elements are grouped into OFDM resource blocks.
The OFDM base stations have coverage sectors with boundaries between the sectors. The RF interference near sector boundaries tends higher than middle-sector interference. The interference at sector boundaries between adjacent base stations at different sites is often the most acute. The OFDM resource elements of these adjacent base stations interfere with one another, especially near the coverage boundary. This OFDM boundary interference can be significantly worse than the interference faced by other wireless communication protocols. The increased OFDM boundary interference degrades services like Voice over Long Term Evolution (VoLTE) and inhibits service deployment. Communication services like VoLTE need an improved Signal-to-Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR) at the base station boundaries to overcome the higher OFDM boundary interference.
Current techniques to control OFDM boundary interference include LTE co-channel interference processes that LTE base stations use to mitigate interference between LTE resource blocks. The LTE base stations exchange resource block interference data over an LTE X2 signaling interface. The LTE base stations use the resource block interference data to avoid using noisy resource blocks. Unfortunately, current OFDM interference mitigation is not good enough to support demanding wireless data services like VoLTE.